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Raspberry Dessert
1 C powdered sugar 1 egg white Slices of plain cake 1 t lemon juice 1 C raspberries Cut slices from plain loaf or sponge cake. Fry in butter until delicately browned. While these are cooking, whip together until very thick the powdered sugar and egg white, and add lemon juice, and berries. Pile this mixture lightly on pieces of cake. Decorate with whole berries and chill before serving.
The failure point here is not the cake but the topping: a raw egg white whipped with sugar, spooned onto the cake and served cold, with no cooking step at any stage.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe sugar-and-white foam is beaten, piled on the fried cake and chilled. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, and Salmonella in shell eggs is a real risk in an uncooked foam that then sits refrigerated with fruit. A teaspoon of lemon juice does not acidify or pasteurize anything.
- Why the cake doesn't helpThe slices are browned in butter before the topping goes on, so the egg never touches a hot surface. By serving time the cake is cold too. Use a current recipe if you want an uncooked meringue or fruit fool.
- Chilling is not a safety stepRefrigeration slows bacterial growth but does not eliminate it. The original gives no holding time at all.
- Terms in the original"C" is cup and "t" is teaspoon. "Powdered sugar" is most likely confectioners' sugar, roughly 4 oz to the cup, though in this period the term was also used for finely ground granulated sugar. "Plain cake" means an unfrosted loaf or sponge.
- YieldThe original gives no yield and does not say how many slices the topping is meant to cover.
Uncooked fruit-and-egg-white foams appear throughout late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookery under names like raspberry snow, apple snow and fruit whip, and were prized because a single egg white beaten hard with sugar and crushed fruit swells to many times its volume — a showy dish from almost nothing. Frying plain cake in butter belongs to the same thrift as fried bread and pain perdu. That such a dessert could be assembled hours ahead and left to chill is precisely the part that a modern kitchen cannot accept.